Talk about anything else: your pets, your car, movies, celebrities, or other things you like. As a reminder, political and religious discussions do not belong in here, nor any other topics that may incite a heated debate! As always keep it clean, please.
I'm not sure if this is old news (as i'm often behind the times!) but I'm forwarding this anyway from another Yahoo group i'm on.
Yahoo is now using something called "Web Beacons" to track Yahoo Group users around the net and see what you're doing and where you are going similar to cookies. Yahoo is recording every website and every group you visit.
Scroll down the page, to the section on cookies, you will see a link that says web beacons. Click on the phrase WEB BEACONS. That will bring you to a paragraph entitled "Outside the Yahoo Network."
In this section you'll see a little "click here to opt out" link that will let you "opt-out" of their new method of snooping.
Once you have clicked that link, you are exempted. Notice the "Success" message on the top of the next page. Be careful because on that page there is a "Cancel Opt-out" button that, if clicked, will *undo* the opt-out.
Perhaps not as free as you might hope. A lot of outfits use web beacons. Yahoo was nice enough to provide a means of opting out of this feature, but not everyone is. You know those html emails that spammers commonly send? You guessed it - they use web beacons. The mail reader interprets the html, loading the 1x1 images (which is what web beacons are), and the server that contains the images makes note, to the extent it can, of who is downloading the image. If nothing else, the spammers can use this to help determine the validity of email addresses in their mega-chumming databases. I try to turn off html interpretation in my mail readers - it's just too big a vulnerability.
